Still only for the Dutch market, as production is slow. I’m looking for faster (less noisy) and better production methods. Is Form1/2 an option? How are costs of resin compared to filament? I calculated that it is a bit faster.
Hey, resin is much more expensive than filament. It is also much more work to print with an SLA printer… if you ignore the fumes of the IPA and the resin itself, there is a really filthy process of cleaning the modell, UV hardening them, removing the support, filtering the left over resin, cleaning the buildplatform… Also you have to take into account that the resin vat also degrades and has to be replaced which is also quite expensive (formlabs themselfes recomment every 1liter a new tank, but some users, and also we are, experiencing quality and riability losses at around 1/2liter resin on a vat. Also tough resin wears down the vat even faster). it is so expensive that we even created a sole product (ReCoat Kit) to cut down the cost at least on that point a bit…
So for 1 liter resin printing you’ll need (as a rough guess)
Resin and resin tray replacements make the cost of printing with the Form1 more than 500% more than FDM. I.E. $270/liter (about 1 kg) for the Form1 ($150/liter for resin plus 2 build trays per liter @ $65 each) vs.about $40/kg for FDM. Protomold.com 2 can make molded parts at a fraction of the setup costs of traditional molds. Quickparts.com 2 also offers some molding options. You can also buy a desktop CNC mill and make your own molds to press parts in a hand operated desktop injection molding machine. The margins you need to make and the quantities of parts you plan to make will determine the best approach.
This one looks very suspicous… just rendered pictures of the printer… they even come up with a new acronym FLD which doesn’t add any value. since you have already a decent FDM with bowden tube i would recommend a lulzbot. since this one gives you a better performance for printing flexible filament
Resin printing (SLA) is a good choice for making a single high quality ‘master’ but would be far too slow and expensive for making hundreds of copies.
Extrusion printing is cheaper and faster than resin, but the quality is much lower. And printing hundreds of copies would be extremely tedious.
I’d recommend using either SLA or extrusion 3d printing to make a master (SLA if you need the resolution), then make a mold and use resin casting to make hundreds of copies. It’ll be a lot faster and cheaper than printing every copy.
For making thousands of copies, injection molding will be cheaper. The reason you can’t use it for smaller quantities is economics - the molds are expensive ($thousands). But once you have them, you can stamp out thousands of copies for near-zero cost.
The only case where it makes sense to print large quantities of the same thing is if they’re personalized, in which case they’re unique. You’ve not mentioned that, so IMO 3d printing isn’t a good way to go for your game parts.
